“Jesus Christ,” Harry said after a pause.
“Agreed,” Torhus said.
“Did you know his wife had a lover?”
Torhus chuckled quietly. “No, but you’d have had to give me very good odds if I was betting she didn’t have one.”
“Why?”
“First of all, because I assume homosexual husbands would turn a blind eye to that kind of thing. Secondly, there is something in the culture of the Ministry that seems to encourage extramarital affairs. Indeed, sometimes new marriages spring up from them. Here at the Ministry you can barely move in the corridors for bumping into ex-spouses, or lovers, ex or current. The service is notorious for its inbreeding. We’re worse than the bloody Norwegian Broadcasting Company.”
Torhus continued to chuckle.
“The lover isn’t from the Ministry,” Harry said. “There’s a Norwegian who’s a kind of local Gekko here, a bigtime currency broker. Jens Brekke. I thought at first he was involved with the daughter, but it turns out it’s Hilde Molnes. They met almost as soon as the family arrived and according to the daughter it’s more than the odd roll in the hay. In fact, it’s quite serious and the daughter reckons they’re going to move in together sooner or later.”
“News to me.”
“At least that gives the wife a possible motive. And the lover.”
“Because Molnes was an obstruction?”
“No, on the contrary. According to the daughter, Hilde Molnes refused to let go of her husband. After he pared down his political aspirations I suppose the cover his marriage afforded wasn’t so important anymore. She must have used visiting rights to her daughter as blackmail. Isn’t that what usually happens? No, the motive is probably even less noble. The Molnes family owns half of Ørsta.”
“Exactly.”
“I asked Crime Squad to check if there was a will and what Atle was sitting on in terms of family shares and other assets.”
“Well, this isn’t my field, Hole, but aren’t you making things a bit complicated now? It could quite simply have been a nutter who knocked on the ambassador’s door and stabbed him to death.”
“Maybe. Does it matter in principle if this nutter is Norwegian, Torhus?”
“What do you mean?”
“Real nutters don’t stab a guy and then remove all useful evidence from the crime scene. They leave a series of puzzles so that we can play cops and robbers afterward. In this case we have a decorative knife, and that’s it. Believe me, this was a carefully planned murder by someone not disposed to playfulness, who wanted the job done and the case dropped for lack of evidence. But who knows—perhaps you need to be just as insane to commit such a murder. And the only nutters I’ve met so far on this case have been Norwegian.”
22
Tuesday, January 14
At length Harry found the entrance between two strip bars in Soi 1 in Patpong. He went up the stairs and entered a semidark room where a gigantic fan in the ceiling circled lazily. Harry ducked involuntarily under the immense blades; he already had the marks to show that doorways and other domestic constructions were not adapted to his one meter ninety-two.
Hilde Molnes was sitting at a table at the back of the restaurant. Her sunglasses, meant to give her anonymity, had the effect of attracting attention to her, he thought.
“Actually I don’t like rice wine,” she said, draining the glass. “Mekhong is the exception. May I offer you a glass, Officer?”
Harry shook his head. She flicked her fingers and had the glass filled.
“They know me here,” she said. “They stop when they think I’ve had enough. And by then as a rule I have had enough.” She laughed huskily. “I hope it’s all right meeting here. Home is … a bit sad now. What’s the purpose of this consultation, Officer?”
She enunciated the words clearly, the way people who habitually try to hide that they’ve been drinking do.
“We’ve just been told that you and Jens Brekke regularly went to the Maradiz Hotel together.”
“There you go!” Hilde Molnes said. “Finally someone who does his job. If you talk to the waiter here he’d be able to confirm that herr Brekke and I also met here on a regular basis.” She spat the words out. “Dark, anonymous, never any other Norwegians, and on top of that they serve the town’s best plaa lòt. Do you like eel, Hole? Saltwater eels?”
Harry was reminded of the man they dragged ashore outside Drøbak. He had been in the sea some days, and his pale cadaverous face had looked at them with a child’s surprise. Something had eaten his eyelids. But what had caught their attention was the eel. Its tail protruded from the man’s mouth and lashed back and forth like a silver whip. Harry could still remember the salty aroma in the air, so it must have been a saltwater eel.